Page 33 of Loco

Sayla was standing by the back door, still barefoot, her cheeks pink from the cold. She turned to me, eyes wide—not with fear but with awe—and pointed outside.

“The snow’s stopped,” she breathed. “And I think there’slessthan there was yesterday. Look—there’s the sun.”

I stepped up behind her and looked past her shoulder through the frosted glass. She was right, the clouds had finally broken, spilling golden light across the icy white world like a blessing. A single ray glinted off the icicles hanging from the eaves, and I just stood there for a moment, letting the sight sink in.

It was asmallthing, but after days of relentless whiteouts, ice, and bone-deep cold, it felt like the final scene in some disaster movie. Like we’d survived something bigger than we realized, and maybe we had.

It was wild how much I’d taken for granted before this storm. This was the calm after the chaos.

And standing there with Sayla, surrounded by dogs and morning light, I realized something simple but solid. I didn’t want to go back to before. What waited for me at work wasn’t just a mess—it was ametric and imperialshit ton of it, piled high and stinking worse by the day. The daily grind of policing came with its usual share of headaches: everyday criminals doing dumb, destructive shit, victims who actually needed help, cases that needed solvingand rarely had clean answers. But then there was theotherlayer—the thick, festering rot beneath the surface. The kind that didn’t come with ski masks or crowbars but with polished boots, pressed uniforms, and shiny badges.

And we were closing in on them.

The deeper we dug into the corruption infecting Palmerstown P.D., the less likely it seemed I had a future there—at least, not one I’d want. The things I’d learned and the people I’dtrusted, it changed how I saw everything. I didn’t know if I could keep serving in a department where half the leadership played with criminals they should’ve been locking up.

Yesterday, Judd called with another update—this one from Ailee, Sayla’s former neighbor and our unexpected informant. What she told him damn near had me braving the tail end of the snowstorm just to knock some crooked heads together.

Right before the storm hit, she’d overheard a phone call between ourChiefand someone we now knew was the sheriff of a town over a hundred miles away. They were discussing plans to move another barbershop operation into Palmerstown. Not just any shop, though, afront. Another cog in their well-oiled machine of money laundering and God knows what else.

After I got off the phone, I did my own digging. I looked into the new businesses that had popped up in town over the past few years. Nothing jumped out on paper, but when I put it all together, there were three new laundromats, four nail bars, and eightbarbershops.

In a town this size, that didn’t scream “thriving business”, it screamedcover operations. It was right in front of us—hiding in plain sight, and its scale hit me like a sledgehammer. They’dbeen laying this groundwork slowly, methodically, for years. This wasn’t just some backroom side hustle, it was an organized, multi-town network of criminal enterprises operating under the protection oflaw enforcement.

My department.

My colleagues.

And I was supposed to show up daily, salute the flag, and pretend everything was okay? Yeah, That wasn’t going to happen.

I didn’t know where this investigation would end or if there’d be anything left of the P.D. when it did. But Ididknow this—Palmerstown needed to be gutted, rebuilt from the ground up. When that happened, we had to decide if we wanted to be part of it or if we were already too far gone to care. Right now, it was definitely the latter.

The snowstorm was finally letting up, and with it came the quiet reminder that reality would come crashing back in. As much as I wanted to pretend the world could stay paused a little longer, the melted edges of ice on the windows told me that wouldn’t happen. I’d be wading back into the chaos sooner than I wanted—into a job that felt less and less like a calling and more like a minefield I was navigating blind.

Still, for now, we were here—just the two of us, wrapped in our own little bubble.

I walked up behind Sayla as she stood by the window, arms folded, eyes distant as she watched the snow taper off. Sliding my arms around her waist, I pulled her close and rested my chin on her shoulder, breathing her in. She smelled like mint tea and warmth and everything I didn’t realize I’d been needing.

“As shitty as this storm’s been,” I murmured, “I’ve kind of liked having our own little world.”

She sighed softly and leaned back into me, her body relaxing against mine. “I was just thinking the same thing,” she said quietly. “Sadly, bills can’t be paid with snowballs.”

I chuckled, even though she was right, too damn right. This temporary break—this illusion of peace—wasn’t sustainable. The outside world was still waiting, and soon enough, we’d have to go back to answering it.

But even as her words settled, my thoughts drifted elsewhere. I hadn’t heard from Kemble in days, which was unlike him. He usually sent me pictures of the kids, updates about their weird little milestones, or dumb memes at random hours. At the very least, I’d get a text every day—sometimes a few. I’d messaged him twice to check how they were holding up through the storm, but he hadn’t responded. Maybe they’d lost power and couldn’t charge their phones, or perhaps they were too busy keeping the kids warm and fed to worry about texts.

Still, the silence gnawed at me.

He lived only two hours away—not exactly across the world. If I needed to check on him, I could make the drive. But even the idea of something being wrong with him or the kids sat wrong in my gut. Kemble wasn’t just a friend—he wasfamily. The closest thing I had to a brother. The guy I’d crossed nearly every milestone of life with—every first, every fuck-up, every win. We’d been literal partners in crime when we were younger before life shoved us into our current roles.

“What are you thinking?” Sayla asked gently, squeezing my arm. Her voice was soft, but it cut through the fog.

I blinked, pulling myself back to the present. “Kemble. I'm just wondering if his generator went down or if they’ve just been offline. It’s weird not hearing from him this long.”

She turned in my arms to look at me, her expression sympathetic. “Now that the storm’s passing, I’m sure they’ll get the power back soon. He’ll probably text or call the second he’s able to. Maybe they’re focused on the kids and trying to make sure everything’s okay on their end.”

I nodded, but it was more out of habit than agreement. “Yeah. Maybe.”

The weight in my chest didn’t ease, though. Between the storm, the ticking time bomb that was work, and this sudden silence from one of the people I trusted most in the world, I felt off. Like I was bracing for something I couldn’t quite see coming.

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